There’s not much improvement since my first look at free Flex IDEs. The use of a full-blown visual designer is still a challenge. So, Flex Builder for Windows is still your first choice – and worth every penny.
Nevertheless, if you are not one of those full time Flex developers and only wanna have a look at what already exists, e.g. for code reviews, these free alternatives can help:
MoreAdobe has created an AIR application that demonstrates what can be done with Flex. There’s even an Eclipse integration that allows to search for components and their source code.
Tour de Flex is a showcase of Flex’s user interface components. It also shows third party stuff, like ILOG Elixir, that we’re using in our project for some time. It is worth to have a look at all components.
The presentation is a bit like the component showcase of ICEfaces. You get additional ...
MoreI read Schalk’s “Adobe announces Open Screen Project” at DZone today. Quite amazing what Adobe is doing here. They skip the licensing of the most important protocols and file formats. These are free to use now, independent from the platform, context, whatever you like.
Additionally, they promise, with the help of the big players in the wireless business, to deliver a runtime with the next Flash player release, that allows to design and deploy applications that behave the same ...
MoreToday I’ll start with the AIRgonaut series. It will give you AIR tips to desktop-like programing questions you may already answered, with Delphi, Visual Basic, and the like in the past. But, today you may recognize that all your know-how is less important and needs an update, because of such obscure ideas the Flex architects had in mind in the past 
.
Well, this is what my feeling was when I started with Flex/AIR this year ...
MoreLast week our project structure changed a bit and I had to think about training new members in the JSF field. I remembered that there’s still a draft article, I started in 2006, in my blog management. Rick from DZone told me that there’s still a need for giving some tips in JSF programming. So, I polished my article .
Hint: If you still think about changing from your current Web presentation framework to something new, ...
MoreToday I was surprised by Loveley Charts, a new application based on Flex that can replace Visio in the near future. Last weekend I already read about Buzzword, a Word replacement, and SlideRocket, a Powerpoint replacement. So, there’s only an Excel replacement missing .
Yes, the AJAX guys already deliver a lot of replacements to get your office online. But, tweaks in usage are still a point of discussion.
AJAX is limited to ...
MoreWow, the Spring guys are fast. The Spring Core gets a 2.5 and some other sub projects are ready for productive use:
Spring 2.5 allows a standardized and JDK 6 compliant use of annotations. So, annotation driven injection can be done. InfoQ has started a series of articles about this and other features. Rod has published some slides about Spring Configuration through annotations, etc. He has also updated his More
I had another look at NetBeans 5.5, incl. the Enterprise and Visual Web Packs, as some comments suggested. Although, the comparison of a full-blown NetBeans with a standard Eclipse WTP is a bit unfair, I don’t use e.g. myEclipse, I tried to compare apples and oranges.
Well, for short: if you worked with Eclipse for some time you feel like driving your car with an active emergency brake. Most annoying, the Netbeans IDE stops for seconds from time to time ...
MoreIf you develop with JSF products you should try to get rid of “tag-based” and get something “visual”. JSF is component-based and similar to the good old GUI development, a lot of us did a decade ago with Delphi, Visual Basic and the like.
If you have a look at OpenSource and cost-free products, there’s not much you can call “visual development”. New in this circle of cost-free wannabes is Exadel Studio Pro.
I already had a look at their standard ...
MoreThe useful becomes better. The Eclipse plugin Spring IDE, that helps to develop your complexer enterprise stuff easier, is announced to become release status in the near future. There are already milestones.
Further reading:
Spring IDE powering ahead
Spring IDE features in Spring IDE 2.0 M1
Spring IDE 2.0 coming soon
Leading Agile Blog Boris Gloger Blog Projekt-Log Blog
Rainer Eschen is an agile coach with a focus on Scrum Project Management.
He is a Certified Professional Scrum Master I, a Certified Project
Management Associate (IPMA Level D) and co-founder of openPM.
Since the mid-1990s Rainer worked as a consultant, developer, architect, team leader, systems engineer, project manager, scrum master and scrum coach – since 2000 with a strong focus on JEE. He was also part of “the source” for 3 years working at Sun Microsystems, Germany.
Rainer is author of the book ICEfaces 1.8: Next Generation Enterprise Web Development, Packt Publishing, 2009.
Rainer at Google+ | Twitter
